A large and increasing portion of the information handled in today's modern office environment is digital. Many organizations, institutions and establishments store, handle and manipulate most of their information, and/or information associated with their activities, in digital forms. In many cases, such information may include confidential, secret or otherwise sensitive information, which, in the wrong hands, may cause serious damage to the owner or keeper of the information and/or to those associated with the owner or keeper of the information. Uncontrolled information flow is a recognized problem in various industries, organizations and environments. For example, commercial organizations, government agencies, academic institutions and/or health care facilities may all be at risk of sensitive information being provided to unauthorized, possibly hostile entities.
Sensitive data may typically be stored in encrypted form, and may be decrypted when required. For example, when an authenticated user requests access to encrypted data, the encrypted data may be decrypted and provided. Evidently, a security risk exists when ever data which is otherwise encrypted is being decrypted.
Sensitive data, which may also be vital or essential to the operation of the owner of the data, may typically be duplicated or backed up, for example, in order to avoid loss of such data. However, current systems and methods expose such sensitive data to security risks during a backup procedure and/or as a result of a backup. For example, encrypted data may be decrypted before being provided to a backup agent or system and may further be stored in decrypted form on a backup system.
Furthermore, current backup systems impose various limitations or constraints on a recovery of backed up data. For example, a recovery may need to be performed on or with relation to the computing device associated with the related backup procedure, e.g., restoration of backed up data may be required to be done to or on the original device. There is a need in the art for a system and/or method to enable secured backup of sensitive data and/or a recovery of backed up data on a device or location of choice.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity.